Addressing the Rot - how blue sky thinking has damaged organisational culture
Organisational investment into culture and change management continues to be significant as leaders and teams alike attempt to address the trials and tribulations of putting people together.
The concept of Blue Sky Thinking emerged in the 1980s as a boundless creative thinking exercise aimed at helping people to suggest and discuss ideas, challenges and problems without limitations. Great in practice but somewhere in its evolution, Blue Sky Thinking has become this over-optimistic approach to landing on ‘What good looks like’. While a team is zooming their ideas about what will deliver a fantastic workplace little or no priority is given to dealing with the factors that made it shitty in the first place.
I, like thousands have others, have spent time eating dried sandwiches and minties while writing my best thinking on post-it notes and placing them on butcher’s paper. Yes, it does work. It falls short because we are only asking what are we striving to achieve when we also need to ask an alternate question which is ‘What do we have to stop doing?’. Asking this doesn’t fit nicely with Blue Sky. Dealing with the underbelly of organisational culture problems is awkward for leaders. But addressing the truth and being accountable for the good, bad and outright ugly makes all the difference for your people and your productivity.
Blue Sky thinking sessions also fit the traditional planning model for bringing leadership teams together. It’s an easy thing to complete in a facilitated session of three hours. Experience tells us that anything negative can take the oxygen of a meeting often without producing tangible results. With our optimism put aside, careful management of the negative needs to be undertaken to remove blame and defensiveness. Therein lies the issue.
How do we challenge the model and create space for broader thinking with our leaders? How do we discuss the hard things we know we need to change? The culture planning model needs to shift gears. Participants need to be able to think, reflect, discuss and determine the pathway for change which deals with the truth of the positive as well as the negative. This requires us to break up the way we engage them across a period of time, not just over a morning or afternoon.
And, yes, it can be as simple as beginning with a list of ‘what we want to do’ and ‘what we want to stop doing’. It’s important to understand why negative behaviours or situations are occurring. These have a profound impact on morale, communication and job satisfaction. Identifying and naming the less desirable attributes affecting the company, without specifics, but in general terms brings light to the issues but assists in minimising inflammatory blaming. A strong accountability culture within the leadership also supports the process - ‘One in, all in’ - to look at what needs to be addressed. So how?
Facilitation needs to come out of a morning/afternoon session and be a wider discussion, providing people with time to think and reflect, over more than just a few hours. Think over a period of weeks culminating in a main session where the team lands the detail.
Change management needs to be embedded in the operating rhythm with key goals picked up by teams to run with. This relies on making sure you have adequate staff and aren’t working them well beyond appropriate working hours. Start by putting change management as an agenda item.
Make change visible - say what has to stop and make sure there are reminders in the workplace. It doesn’t have to be negative. Lead with the positive, perhaps with comms which says, ‘We used to do that but now we do this’.
Actively cultivate your culture through your people. Continue to hire people who have an attitudinal alignment to the type of culture you are trying to create. Ask questions about working style, work hours, problem-solving and team dynamics to see what comes back. And your team will be able to tell you who is ruining the vibe with their micromanaging, gossip and meanness. So hard to talk about it in reality for a number of reasons but the relief is almost palpable when a bad apple leaves a company. This can sometimes create an almost instant culture shift. You’re all nodding, I know.
Our biggest challenge is making space to make improvements. Making space to consider and reflect, to plan and to communicate, has positive knock-on effects for innovation and productivity. If you can do this with your team then your Blue Sky will take off. Is it time to address the rot?